Technology expands human capabilities. Yet, as technology evolves to our needs, so too do we adapt to technology. This dynamic between human and artifice is at the heart of Subpatch's work. By employing gesture capture devices to extend human expressivity into digital domains, Subpatch create multimedia experiences encompassing the range of human experience, from reflective and universal to light and absurd. Subpatch premiered their first large-scale work, A Well-Played Game at the AMOK Festival in York, UK in February 2019. Since then, they have appeared at the VU!3 Sypmosium in Park City, Utah and at the Brunel Museum in London. Subpatch was founded in 2018 by Jared Bennett, Lazar Liebenberg, and Jon Paul Mayse in a table in the corner of the canteen at the Royal Academy of Music.
for two performers and fixed media
In A Well-Played Game, we reframe the simple game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to present its ramifications in a new light. While the traditional game is one of straight-forward victory, A Well-Played Game emphasizes agreement rather than adversity as the desired objective. This naïve and beautifully simple game is transformed to become an immersive musico-dramatic experience, combining music, film, and theatre.
A Well-Played Game puts an interesting spin on the nostalgic singlemindedness of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Through the connection and subversion of nostalgic elements and childhood games, we hope to explore what it means to agree, to disagree, and to toe the line between the sentimental sublimity of childhood and the chaos of conflict.
for performers and fixed media
Does a space remember? Since the early 16th century, musicians have filled the halls of the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia with sounds, affecting and arresting listeners. People in 1530 might have heard the motet Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi by Julio Cessare Martinego
which runs through this piece, reverberating off the walls, much as you do, as a never-before-heard music in an unexperienced space.
What was new then is new now.
Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi is a process of discovery, connected by architecture,
fulfilled by two performers with phones, interacting with imagined memories of historic places.
An algorithm mediates their interactions with the sound and the space, creating unique environments
derived from the motet and the hall. Each performer must use their phones as aural flashlights,
illuminating the sound in the space.
Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi was premiered June 19, 2019 at the Brunel Museum in London, UK